mike, blessed be his little cotton socks, teaches me things. one thing he’s taught me is to read mystery fiction as if it’s something that matters. except, now, i don’t know why it matters. i’ve crawled almost to the end of dennis lahane’s gone, baby, gone. i chose him because he’s explicitly quoted by the wire, which many of us revere, and this particular book of his because mike gave it five stars on goodreads. but now i’m not sure what i’m reading. why cops and PIs chasing bad people matter. what they are telling me about this world and its representations.
and i think they must matter, because you, mike, are reading all this south african detective fiction, and the implication is that it will tell you something about south african culture and south african literature that other kinds of fiction might not.
there is pleasure, of course, in reading detective stories. there was a time when i was living in san luis obispo in which i read a ton of detective fiction. i was a bit worried at the time because i was totally addicted to it, stayed up every night till all hours devouring novels, couldn’t stop. i weened myself from what i thought was a totally guilty pleasure by overdosing on it. one day i couldn’t read one more word.
i read mostly: sara paretsky, laurie king, patricia cornwell. i read other stuff, too: kate wilhelm, j.m. redmann. redmann and paretsky were my favorites. since i didn’t know that reading mystery fiction was a Good And Intelligent Thing To Do (i don’t know anything; i feel i’m always learning to walk on new kinds of terrain; really), i haven’t read these two women in years. a few months ago the redoubtable john leonard wrote a rave review of sara paretsky’s memoir writing in an age of silence (which i haven’t read) in which he highly praised her mystery fiction too, and i thought with pleased amazement: “really? it’s okay to like sara paretsky?!” fortunately, i always knew walter mosley was okay, so i have kept up with reading him.
even then, though, even with the obviously literary mosley, some emptiness creeps into my… soul? when i read mystery novels. it’s as if my teeth were sinking in pudding rather than meat. i like my pudding like the next person, but one’s gotta eat meat to keep on one’s feet.
gone, baby, gone, which i just discovered has recently come out on dvd (i.e. a recent movie has been made of it: who knew?) spends a good amount of time with two police detectives and two PIs who are also a man/woman romantic couple (the man of the couple is the narrator) while they ruin their physical and mental health obsessing over the disappearance of a little girl from a boston neighborhood that may be significant to bostonites but is meaningless to me. i haven’t gotten to the end so don’t spoil it for me, but, now that we are nearing it, the novel is clearly pointing in the direction of seriously sick child exploitation rings. this was not the case for most of it, which followed our four people around in wild goose chases in which the novelistic interest was mainly in showing how much they had personally invested in finding the girl.
which little girl has all but been abandoned by her junkie mother, and although her aunt and uncle clearly love and miss her tremendously, it is not their loss the novel is concerned with. hardened detectives poole and broussard and hardened PIs patrick kenzie and angie gennaro is all we care about.
since, for some reason having to do with my undoubtedly sick nature, i couldn’t care less about the abduction and exploitation of little amanda (or the book’s occasional other little children), the obsession and pain of our four heroes has kept me less than riveted. in particular, i fail to be gripped by kenzie, who comes across to me as an unconvincing mixture of the PI gentleman and the rogue PI. really, though, the torturing of children doesn’t speak to me, as it does to the author and the characters of this book, of the Meaningless of All Things Human. i don’t find it any worse than the torturing of women and men. this makes the narrative pathos feel flimsy to me.
just a few thoughts, fresh from my mind.
Well Mike’s gonna have to really come through if I’m gonna even try to read it now. For me, this book is “Gone, Baby, Gone.”
Ah, the gauntlet’s down. I’m not sure I’m going to defend Gone the way you might like. But I’ll come back to the merits of detective fiction, maybe riff on my very loose opening thoughts on where I might go with the South Africa stuff, later.
Gone is later in a series of books–and, since you like Paretsky and “The Wire,” I think you’re okay with series. I often get bogged down or just burned out on ‘em, but if/when they work, the series can develop some great riffs and ripples. Things that happen in Gone, the relationship between the PIs for instance, is both consequent from and complicating of events in earlier novels. These two became a couple, and stop being one, later on.
My favorite thing about Lehane is his compassion for those trapped in morally-suspect behaviors. He really, really gets this astoundingly well in Mystic River, the novel of which is far less moralizing and certain about the Ultimate Horror of child/sexual abuse. Sure, it’s bad. But one of the main characters (who was played by Robbins in the movie) is a victim and, we are led to believe early on (I won’t give away the end), perhaps a new victimizer–and the book’s just amazing at grappling with the implications of the crime on his life, the implications of his own attempts to find a moral/ethical center. That character made the book for me, but everybody’s circling around it.
Lehane’s fiction–like some of my favorite detective fiction–uses the hook of narrative justice, that a crime will occur and corruption will be rooted out and the society will be restored. But the hook is hammered into other shapes; there’s an abiding suspicion of such narratives of Justice, and the books at their best grapple with the social, psychological, and (yes) narrative or ideological structures which trap us into hurting one another, into crime. Hence his work on “The Wire”–like Richard Price and George Pelecanos, two other sort-of mystery writers lured into scripting, Lehane and much of our great crime fiction is about systems of culture in ways that novels, perhaps particularly pop novels, tend to sidestep. There’s the romance of the individual detective, certainly… but (I’m recalling the film of “Gone”) the end is Patrick sitting down the couch from the girl he’s “saved,” his relationships wrecked, hell almost all relationships wrecked. There’s something profoundly subversive of such individual romances, no knights in Lehane’s fiction.
But what I liked about Gone and the other series novels of Lehane’s is the language, the carnival of Southie talk that is so fantastically rendered. I love those early Lehane novels perhaps more for their performance as entertainments, and the Mystic and Wire Lehane for what issues the language serves.
Make sense? In South African fiction (and culture) now, where there’s a new neo-Capitalist ideology afoot, where fiction writers are trying to find new foci for narrative after a century’s worth of literary history focused on resistance to a dominant oppressive system… well, I think detective fiction is where people are grappling most fully and intriguingly with the lingering systemic forces at work in the country (racism, gender-based violence, child abuse, poverty POVERTYPOVERTY, corruption…)…. but I need to spell this out more.
Sorry this took me so long to get to!
I wasn’t very clear on two points.
One, series fiction: its “depths” are not often visible read in stand-alone chunks. VI Warshawski, for instance, is more interesting over five novels than one.
Two, child abuse–I do think Lehane falls prey to the American anxiety about “child” crime… but I also think it’s something of a hook, a common cultural narrative he uses to push on harder things. The threat of a child exploitation ring is HORROR… but it’s also extravagant, and a red herring. The horrors of trying to do right by a child are far more complicatedly difficult, and (as noted) the book ends with the kid “restored” to her mother–not the grand CERTAIN horror of sexual abuse but far murkier complexities.
I think I’d add another thing: why on earth would it be bad to read detective fiction? I don’t get the self-flagellating obsession with having to read “GOOD” literature. Isn’t it how you read, not what you read?
the idea of narrative justice is very interesting, mike. it’s a good way to think of mysteries. such a good way, in fact. thanks.
i have nothing against reading mysteries, by the way. i used to, but i’m now reformed. i’ve seen the light, thanks in large measure to you. maybe only to you! still, i don’t like what they do to me. it’s hard to explain except maybe in terms of obsession. i suppose i don’t like feeling obsessed. maybe that’s it.
but you are right about the moral complications of gone, the ultimate sense of despair.
maybe i just didn’t care enough, you know? and i do do do like women protagonists in my books. i need women protagonists in my books. (angie by the way has a good role in gone-the-book which, as you point out elsewhere, she doesn’t have in gone-the-movie. too bad. she adds a really nice dimension to the book, particularly with her braininess and toughness.)